Aetna And Travelers Go Back In Time To Play Women's Basketball Game

HARTFORD — The setting is elegant and theater-like, a large white room with a balcony running around the perimeter and a stage at one end. The floor is carpeted in red.

For years, it's been a meeting room at Aetna Inc.'s building on Farmington Avenue. On Thursday night, it will become a basketball court.

After a story appeared in The Courant in March about the successful Aetna women's basketball teams of the 1920s and '30s, Aetna was inspired to go back in time for a game between the women of Aetna and the women of Travelers, rivals back in the day.

Spurred on by John Bermel, the retired chief financial officer of business operations, the game was organized, the basketball court uncovered and refurbished, the old brick ticket window out behind the court cleaned and polished and teams recruited from both insurance giants. Thursday's game is only open to Aetna and Travelers employees and invited members of the Hartford Boys and Girls Clubs, whose girls will be featured in a game at halftime.

Kim Sciascia, the former University of St. Joseph women's basketball coach who now works in the internal audit department at Aetna, didn't know about the Aetna women's teams that attracted so much attention and drew crowds of 1,500 people to games during the Depression.

"I had no idea [the court] was here," said Sciascia, who will play as well as coach the team. "It's exciting to be able to play where they used to play. To kind of relive history."

Travelers had a successful team — the "Tower Five" — first, starting in 1921. The 1921-22 team went 20-2 and outscored its opponents, 469-180. According to Bermel, the people from Travelers encouraged Aetna to start a team in 1923. Adrian Brennan, who worked at Aetna, was the coach.

Over the next decade, the Aetna girls — the "Crimson Tide," who were also known as the "hotsy-totsy girls from Hartford" in the New York press — won 111 of 133 games. They played in (and won) the first women's basketball game at Madison Square Garden in 1928. Dr. James Naismith traveled from Springfield to watch them play.

Travelers and Aetna had a hotly contested rivalry for the city championship, as well as the Connecticut Women's Basketball League Championship. From 1927-29, Aetna won the title, as well as the Defenders Trophy, which will be given to the winner of Thursday's game.

In 1934, The Courant wrote of a 30-26 victory against the Middletown Speed Girls: "One of the largest crowds to see a Hartford basketball game in a decade — more than 2,000 — turned out with all sorts of whistles, horns and noise-makers. The almost unprecedented rivalry and the speed at which the two teams played helped to make it a game full of thrills and excitement. The only untoward incident came when a Middletown spectator tripped referee Billy Coyle. A policeman ejected him from the building."

When Aetna moved from the city (downtown Hartford) to the "suburbs" (Farmington Avenue) into its new building, a planned auditorium was turned into a basketball court for the company's popular team.

"The president of the company took it upon himself to change the design of the building, so there was a basketball court suitable for the women to play in," Bermel said.

Bermel, who plays basketball, was one employee who knew there was a basketball court under all that carpet. He floated an idea early in the 2000s — what if the UConn women could play there against a team from Aetna? — but that never went anywhere.

And so the floor stayed hidden for another decade or so.

"When I saw The [Courant] article, I sent a note to [the communications and community relations people] and said, 'Why don't we try to rekindle this friendly rivalry?'" Bermel said. "They said, 'Sounds like a great idea. We're right behind you.'

"I took it and ran with it. We've had lots of meetings. I called [chief administrative officer] Andy Bessette at the Travelers and said, 'Would you like to play a game against Aetna?'"

Bessette absolutely would.

"He stopped me in the hall once and he said, 'You're tall. Do you play basketball?'" said Joelle Nawrocki, who played at Fairfield University and works at Travelers. "I said yes. Then I was brought into a meeting where he shared the idea with us.

"I was ecstatic. I didn't think I'd ever have an opportunity to play again for a crowd."

Craig Brown, one of Aetna's facility managers, was in charge of renovating the court. He had never seen it until they started pulling up the tiles of rug that were glued to the floor.

"That's what's been nice about this event is, it's forced us to fix up some interesting historical aspects of the space," Brown said. "When I started popping tiles, my first impression was, 'Oh, my gosh, how are we going to clean this up?' When the carpet came up, it was a sea of glue."

The court was sanded and refinished and laid out in a similar fashion to the photos dug out of the archives. Brown got portable hoops. They are bringing in bleachers.

Aetna's team seems stacked: Brooke Bailey, who played at Central Connecticut, is one of the players, as well as Sciascia, who played at Temple, and Kara Kochanek, who played at Iona, graduating in 2012. Hilda Reedom, who plays for the Connecticut Classics senior women's team and was inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, is another team member.

"I wouldn't say it's the first annual," said Susan Millerick, director of Northeast communications at Aetna. "But we would like to make it a tradition. The hope is that this will take off."